It's too bad that Tale of Two Cities is so many people's first (and thus often only) exposure to Dickens. I love Dickens and wordy 19th-century fiction generally, and have been fairly interested in the French Revolution and I still find Tale of Two Cities rather hard going. Dickens greatest strengths are his ability to make a virtue of verbosity and how closely observed and rich his characters and settings are. Tale of Two Cities did not play to the latter strength at all, which makes the lengthiness less of a gift.
Yeah I've been hearing that lately, so I picked up David Copperfield and I'm going to give that one a go. I got like three pages in to Tale of Two Cities in high school and just completely bounced off. And the problem was not that I couldn't handle the language -- shortly thereafter I was a star student of German philosophy in college, lol.
Right on. A major complaint I have about modern culture is how far away it has gotten from the 4000-some years of normative literature that largely defines how to be human successfully and graciously and with integrity. We seem to have turned our backs on all that. The end result of our doing so currently squats in the Oval Office. Back in the 1970s I called it "The Death of a Liberal Arts Education" — it was noticeable then and has only gotten worse since. *Much* worse since 2000. I sometimes wonder if the new millennium blew our fuses — the *real* Y2K problem.
Yep. There was a sea change in thinking two or three decades ago where it was decided (by deciders) that it was okay to like pop art. But that evolved into permission to only like pop art. Which is like living on nothing but fast food. And, as you say, here we are.
It's too bad that Tale of Two Cities is so many people's first (and thus often only) exposure to Dickens. I love Dickens and wordy 19th-century fiction generally, and have been fairly interested in the French Revolution and I still find Tale of Two Cities rather hard going. Dickens greatest strengths are his ability to make a virtue of verbosity and how closely observed and rich his characters and settings are. Tale of Two Cities did not play to the latter strength at all, which makes the lengthiness less of a gift.
Yeah I've been hearing that lately, so I picked up David Copperfield and I'm going to give that one a go. I got like three pages in to Tale of Two Cities in high school and just completely bounced off. And the problem was not that I couldn't handle the language -- shortly thereafter I was a star student of German philosophy in college, lol.
Right on. A major complaint I have about modern culture is how far away it has gotten from the 4000-some years of normative literature that largely defines how to be human successfully and graciously and with integrity. We seem to have turned our backs on all that. The end result of our doing so currently squats in the Oval Office. Back in the 1970s I called it "The Death of a Liberal Arts Education" — it was noticeable then and has only gotten worse since. *Much* worse since 2000. I sometimes wonder if the new millennium blew our fuses — the *real* Y2K problem.
The irony is that I think the Common Core was meant to alleviate some of this by helping to align national culture a bit more, but, welp. Here we are.
Yep. There was a sea change in thinking two or three decades ago where it was decided (by deciders) that it was okay to like pop art. But that evolved into permission to only like pop art. Which is like living on nothing but fast food. And, as you say, here we are.